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5 Top Brews from 2012

Disclaimer: Strictly speaking, as I wrote this while sober, this isn’t drunken speculation. I am, however, very tired and hungry, which is a kind of drunk.

One of my very mild superpowers, aside from having a phenomenal tear film, is that regardless of how off course a night goes, I can usually remember, to within a standard drink or two, how many drinks I had the night before.

However, when it comes to choose five of the best beers of 2012, I am at a loss. How can I be expected to remember which are the best beers I’ve had all year? What am I? Some sort of beer-fueled robot, devoid of emotion, powered only by the desire to catalogue humanity’s mind-boggling variety of yeast-based carbonated alcoholic drinks?

Spoiler: I am not a robot. I am merely human and I drink far too many beers in an average year for me to able to compile an objectively assessed list of Australia’s finest beers.

Therefore, my method is not to merely choose the best beers of 2012. I’m going for the five beers that penetrated the sordid haze that was the previous year to the point that I recall them in particular when presented with a list of craft beers. My preference is for that association to be positive but there’s no guarantees.

Moo Brew is brewed at MONA in Tasmania and you know what? The people I work for at my day job are very proud to have been involved in that project. I built a model of it as part of a team building exercise.

So when I occasionally find Moo Brew in my hand, I think that, maybe, just maybe, my day job would be more fulfilling if I could work on a brewery project. In the interim, if there’s more beers out there like this, I’ll cope.

I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to drink a coffee-flavoured beer with a giraffe on the tap when I saw it. It’s a giraffe ON THE TAP! Plus it’s like that beer from the Drew Carey Show and 90s nostalgia is very in right now. Top notch brew.

#3 Matilda Bay Redback

I am the living definition of irony. I, a craft beer lover, was temporarily seconded to Perth in 2012, the literal other side of the continent to my normal habitat. Did I go to the Little Creatures Brewery in Fremantle? Nope – too busy, thank you very much, work. I did, however, buy a Victorian brewed beer named after an arachnid first found in South Australia and enjoyed it a great deal.

#4 Wig & Pen Bob’s Armpit

One of our first attempts at making a fist of this beer tasting thing happened at the Wig & Pen in Canberra. The best we could come up with for Bob’s Armpit was “smells kind of gluey” (lol). This selection is for the nights I’ve spent at the Wig & Pen, expanding my horizons with the likes of Fiery Aztec (tastes like dirt and burns like chilli because, you know, it’s got chilli in it) and Spiced Olde Ale (tastes like Sambuca had a baby with Captain Morgan and then decided to abort it).

Those guys will keep getting my money as long as they keep pushing the envelope.